Of Ideas and Politics: The Rich Promise of History De-Centered.(Book review)

The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History by Donald Critchlow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)

Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism by Alfred S. Regnery (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008)

Perhaps contemporary conservatives misunderstand their own movement because conservative philosophy distorts conservative history. Ideas, not material conditions, drive history, conservatives aver. Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (an editor's title much disliked by Weaver) established a powerful model for tracing moral and civilizational change--often decline--to rather small alterations in beliefs, such as medieval nominalism. Importantly, most of the sweeping historical narratives produced by conservatives in the early days of the conservative awakening emerged from the typewriters of non-historians--men of letters whose training and intellectual dispositions were more literary than empirical. Often works of genius (one thinks of Russell Kirk's Roots of American Order, for instance), the most powerful books at the dawn of the movement provided such a compelling case for understanding history as idea-driven that conservatives have inherited an overly simplistic historical imagination--one excessively philosophical and insufficiently empirical.

The tendency to understand historical causality in this way, and to understand the history of the conservative movement in terms of the fight over ideas, is greatest among those who are more traditionalist and who think of American civilization as the latest and imperiled bastion of Western civilization (people like me). But thinkers from those other streams of conservatism that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s also tend to think in terms of a clash of ideas, a struggle over cherished beliefs. This is true of those who point to Hayek as their inspiration or to Buckley or Strauss or even Meyer's later fusionism. All of these schools of thought deemphasize material conditions at the expense of lofty ideals. Moreover, these same people often chastise the materialist arguments of the leading academics not only as in error but also as expressions of the kind of bad ideas that threaten to undermine our civilization.

The brilliant book by George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, provided a paradigmatic narrative of the conservative movement through the 1960s. Nash's command of the wide-ranging materials of the diffuse movement and his ability to note connections, to articulate an intellectual movement that had coherence despite enormous ideological tensions, made it possible for almost all self-conscious conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s to think of themselves as heirs to an intellectual flowering, even as they focused their energies on politics and policy. Of course Nash never intended his first book to define conservatism in America as such, and a careful survey of his body of work reveals that no scholar has a better grasp of the subtle complexities of the history of conservatism. But the success of Nash's book gave his subject--conservative intellectuals--a primacy in the larger narrative that Nash never intended. And so the excellent telling of history contributed to our distorted view of history.

The rise of a political conservatism in the 1970s and the dominance of self-identified conservative political figures since the early 1980s have created interesting difficulties in defining conservatism and in understanding the relationship between the intellectual movement and the political movement, and it has tested greatly the view of history as simply ideas-driven. Conservative scholars have written often on the relationship between ideas and politics, of the connections between the literary scholar or the political theorist and the politics of tax policy, of liberationist foreign policy, of almost all the policies now associated with the Republican Party. Some find in the story an evolution--ideas have consequences and good philosophy leads to good policy. Others find the rise to political power of right-wing elements to have so disconnected the movement from its philosophical origins as to represent a betrayal.